


To Hope, To Fight

by dalniente



Category: Megamind (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Apocalypse, Death, Expanded lore, F/M, Fluffy Ending, How Do I Tag, I Don't Even Know, Post-Apocalypse, Pre-Apocalypse, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates, megamind's homeworld, the black hole and all that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:26:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28776771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dalniente/pseuds/dalniente
Summary: It goes this way, for the people of the shallowed land, who have two arms and maker's hands. On the clever hand, a marking of the soul's tidal pull, which the people of Earth might call love. And on the strong hand, a marking of the soul's ending. Seventeen days before the world crumbles, the children of the shallowed land greet the dawn with doomsday in their hands.
Relationships: Megamind/Roxanne Ritchi
Comments: 17
Kudos: 76





	To Hope, To Fight

**Author's Note:**

> This one focuses primarily on Megamind’s parents and the end of the world. (Care warning for a somewhat visceral description of that.) This is another one written in a short time frame, but there's lore about Megamind’s world. And some cute stuff at the end! so maybe just scroll all the way down if you want something lighthearted.

They have eight days of hope. Eight days of a little song.

It isn't a lot of time, but at least they had notice. At least Dawnlight on the Beached Shell intercepted and translated the frantic if fruitless communications from their world's atmospheric civilization to the mycorrhiskeletal interlopers. At least they _knew_. And although they do not have enough time to truly warn their people, they have time enough to craft a ship to send their child beyond the stars.

Their bonded, Curve of Eelgrass and Dimming Down the Deeping Wall, work to find candidate planets that meet their atmospheric and marine requirements. Dawnlight on the Beached Shell works to establish neutral (friendly is out of the question) communications with their neighbors who call themselves _Glau_ , and Sun's Dance in Shallow Water works to design a ship.

(Those who had the power to listen refused to do so. Dawnlight on the Beached Shell and Sun's Dance in Shallow Water tried to speak, but found no ears to hear them. To communicate with travelers from beyond the stars--that is the purvey of the cloud-people, the kite-people. Always, they have handled such things. These tensions are no different, surely. _It is not our place to interfere, to intervene_ , said the people who might have been able to help, and finally the pair retreated to find their own solution. They had the timers on their hands, after all. Perhaps this would be all right, in the end...?)

(No.)

Tensions mount, skyward, and suddenly, suddenly at sea-level the planet is seething with worry. Her people read the timers on their newest children's hands, and all of them, all of them display the same thing.

(It goes this way, for the people of the shallowed land, who have two arms and maker's hands. On the clever hand, a marking of the soul's tidal pull, which the people of Earth might call _love_. And on the strong hand, a marking of the soul's ending. These timings are displayed at birth, though not determined for sure; the true timing may shift somewhat via unknowable unknown circumstance. If this occurs, the displays will remain unchanged.)

Seventeen days before the world crumbles, the children of the shallowed land greet the dawn with doomsday in their hands.

In seventeen days, every last one of them will die, all within the same four minutes. Charted out across the surface of their world, their deaths display as a single ripple from west to east. Pulled towards their sun. No soulmates, no love in this final generation-- their clever hands are blank.

Seventeen days is not enough time, even for a world of brilliant minds. The parents of the child that will call himself Megamind have less than twice that--

\--but it is enough for them, at least. Barely.

They work.

They work without hope. They know what is coming. Dawnlight on the Beached Shell is one of the few in friendly contact with the civilization in this world's methane layer, who fell out of touch with the terrestrial people when all of their glorious, vaunted technology could not prevent the AtiirqHrrrai event, the Shallowing, the Shivering. Dawnlight on the Beached Shell is a diplomat to the clouds, and Sun's Dance in Shallow Water is an engineer, and their efforts are hopeless and they know this, but--

But hope is not the point. To win is not the point.

The point is to _fight_.

The people of the clouds cannot reason with the mycorrhiskeletal interlopers, and the people of the shallowed land have no weapons for battle, and the people of the shivered seafloor have no hands to build. But the latter two are stronger together than ever their ancestors were alone, and they can both dream and craft.

Eight days before their world crumbles into the artificial anomaly that was their sun, the egg that Sun's Dance in Shallow Water bore into hir family's capture-pool tears open. Curve of Eelgrass and Dimming Down the Deeping Wall help the squirming infant to the surface to find his lungs, and the child's parents break from their hopeless crafting and calculations to greet him.

And--

Their diplomacy was without hope. Their calculations were without hope. Their seeking of other worlds was without hope.

But they have eight days of a hopeful little song, because the timer on their infant's strong hand displays a full lifespan for one of the people of the shallowed land. A little shorter, perhaps, and it does flicker a bit-- for a moment they think he will only have (by Earth's measure) seven years, then fifteen, then nineteen, thirty-six-- but quickly it settles, steady as the rising tide, at a full eighty-eight years of life. The timer on the infant's clever hand flickers at similar intervals, but settles at a stubborn twenty-seven.

Dawnlight on the Beached Shell and Sun's Dance in Shallow Water stand shoulder-deep in the water of their capture-pool with their scallops and their parrotfish, and they look at one another in the light of their bonded, and they touch foreheads and breathe.

They can win this. Their little song latches, nurses, and the pair of them take just a few moments to pause and breathe together.

They will win this.

The knowledge is not enough to find a salvation for their planet's peoples, and the hope in their hearts is not enough to find sanctuary from fear at the end of days. But they find their little song a compatible child of the shivered seafloor, and the two are bonded with barely thirty minutes to spare--

as the cloud people cut their engines and fall silently to the waves under the burning sky

running feet and panic on the shining floating habitats, panic and screaming as the sky boils away into too many stars, panic and choking screaming as terrible terrible gravity takes hold and the people of the shallowed land stumble, gasping, into the sea before it boils and rips them into sticky steam 

and then there is silence

and there is no life

only stars

And a promise, written on an infant's hands, eight days old and planetless but with eighty-eight years ahead of him.

Hopefully.

* * *

His life is not easy. He lives hopelessly in the beginning. He nearly dies a hundred times and his heart fully stops at least once. But finally hope bears itself out; finally he lives with love in his heart as his only song, with no shadow of death looming over him.

He curls himself up to the pull of his soul's tide in their home on the banks of a freshwater sea, and he does not dream of stars or of dying. He does not dream of frantic calculations or diplomacy. He is sleeping on his sofa with his wife, purring, and he dreams of days past with his bonded. He dreams of all the weapons his people could not bear to build, of explosions and glorious glorious battles against the child of Glauquai who calls him brother now, who laughs together with his bonded and sings out-of-tune songs.

Their bonded happens past and catches the pair of them napping, and their bonded scoffs and rolls his eyes, picks them both up, and carries them away and dumps them unceremoniously onto their bed before returning to his task and texting the child of Glauquai--

**i found them on the sofa AGAIN, this is ridiculous, they have a nice bed and for heaven's sake they should sleep in it.**

**hello?**

**you had better not be asleep on YOUR sofa again or i WILL scream**

_(says the guy who refuses to sleep in his perfectly good saltwater pool. fine, fine, i'm going to bed, god)_

\--and then, because OKAY YES that's a decent enough point, he throws up his hands and clanks down to his pool to go and sleep with his scallops, his parrotfish.

**Author's Note:**

> The scallops and parrotfish of Punkt are of course not the same as those on Earth, but they are visually similar and culturally significant. The scallops of Punkt are inedible but they are shelled molluscs capable of swimming, and they have many eyes along their rims. In the folk stories of the Punktsil, they often appear as witness type characters. The parrotfish of Punkt are brightly-colored eaters of coral, much larger than those on Earth, and significant to the Punktak as symbols of the life/death cycle. The Punktak are semi-cartilaginous, but when they die, they are given to the reefs so their non-cartilage bones will create substrate for corals and other sedentary animals. Eventually, they are consumed by the parrotfish, whose meat makes up a significant chunk of the Punktak diet. Thus the dead help to nourish the living, however indirectly. 
> 
> (The actual digestive process of a parrotfish is to digest the small living things IN the coral, like algae and small crustaceans and coral polyps, and the coral skeleton substrate is ground up and excreted as sand. There are beautiful white sand beaches on Earth made almost entirely of parrotfish leavings.)
> 
> (Also, don't eat parrotfish; they cannot be fished sustainably on Earth.)


End file.
